1. Field
This disclosure generally relates to software integration. More particularly, the disclosure relates to processing events in a software integration environment.
2. General Background
A business integration environment allows a plurality of business applications to work together. In particular, a source enterprise application may be utilized to transmit business data to a target enterprise application. The source enterprise application first sends data to a source adapter component. The source adapter component is a standardized interface that allows the source enterprise application to communicate with process server components. Accordingly, the business data may then be transmitted from the source adapter component to several process server components. Further, the process server components may then transmit the business data to a target adapter component. The target adapter component is a standardized interface that allows the process server components to communicate with the target enterprise application. Finally, the target adapter component may then transmit the business data to the target enterprise application so that the target enterprise application can utilize the business data. Applications, such as external web services, web applications, and java clients can directly invoke process server components that update an enterprise application via the adapter associated with the enterprise application.
The source enterprise application may generate the business data in a particular order. This business data is modeled as one or more business objects, which are instances of a framework for modeling and manipulating data. In one embodiment, the one or more business objects are defined in XML. Further, in one embodiment, java can be utilized to programmatically create instances and programmatically manipulate business data. After creating the customer business object, the source enterprise application may send a series of updates to the customer business object, e.g., a first update and a second update. Accordingly, the target enterprise application should receive the customer business object, the first update, and the second update from the source enterprise application in the same order in which the source enterprise application sent the business data to ensure accurate processing.
In asynchronous communication, a client can send data to a target computer and return without having to wait for the data to be processed. Further, the target computer can process the data at a later time. In an asynchronous multi-threaded environment, the processing of the messages is typically performed in parallel by multiple threads. In a multi-threaded environment, it is possible that one thread can race ahead of another thread and cause the messages to be processed out of order. In the example above, a multi-threaded environment would allow the target enterprise application to receive and process the first update prior to creating the customer business object. If the target enterprise application receives the first update prior to creating the customer business object, the target enterprise application has nothing to update. As a result, one or more exceptions may be created in the target enterprise application, which may cause a variety of problems and ultimately lead to errors.
A synchronous singled threaded environment, in which a client cannot return until the target computer processes data at the target computer, could be utilized, but is not scalable. A large number of computing devices will not work optimally in such an environment. Businesses are generally interested in utilizing batch processing, which allows a series of jobs to be queued at the target computer for processing. Accordingly, businesses are more interested in working in an asynchronous multi-threaded environment because of the ability to utilize parallel processing, which allows for greater efficiency with respect to processing such as batch processing.
Specialized components could also be built to ensure that threads are processed in the intended order. However, such an approach is intrusive. In other words, businesses would have to purchase additional software components that would have to be configured to work with existing software technology. Further, the existing software technology may have to be configured to allow for integration of the specialized components. This intrusive configuration may lead to a large expense and loss of valuable productivity time for most businesses.